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Raja Shehadeh's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Raja Shehadeh recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Raja Shehadeh's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
From Coexistence to Conquest seeks to explain how the Arab-Israeli conflict developed by looking beyond strict legalism to the men behind the policies adopted by the Great Powers at the dawn of the twentieth century. It controversially argues that Zionism was adopted by the British Government in its 1917 Balfour Declaration primarily as an immigration device and that it can be traced back to the 1903 Royal Commission on Alien Immigration and the Alien’s Act 1905.

The book places the violent reaction of the Palestine Arabs to mass Jewish immigration in the context of Zionism,...
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Recommended by Raja Shehadeh, and 1 others.

Raja ShehadehI’m a lawyer as well as a writer so I’m interested in the legal aspects of the Palestinian conflict. Many books look at the legal side and many more at the history. This book combines the two: Kattan believes you can’t understand one without the other. I absolutely agree with him. (Source)

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2

Footnotes in Gaza

From the great cartoonist-reporter, a sweeping, original investigation of a forgotten crime in the most vexed of places

Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts.

Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident in 1956, that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by...

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Recommended by Raja Shehadeh, Hillary Chute, and 2 others.

Raja ShehadehThis is an amazing, graphic and emotional book about the massacres carried out by the Israelis in the Gaza Strip in 1956. (Source)

Hillary ChuteJoe Sacco is the foremost figure in what he calls ‘comics journalism’ – he really established this category. (Source)

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3

Mural

Mahmoud Darwish was the Palestinian national poet. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession, exile and loss. His poems also display a brilliant acuity, a passion for and openness to the world and, above all, a deep and abiding humanity. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works, his long masterpiece “Mural,” a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, “The Dice... more
Recommended by Raja Shehadeh, and 1 others.

Raja ShehadehDarwish spent his adult life in Israel. The village where he was born was destroyed in 1948. He started writing poetry when he was very young. He later became a communist and was very active politically, although he spent some time in prison. Palestinians living in Israel until 1967 endured a military government and there were many restrictions on their lives. Darwish went abroad to study and... (Source)

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4

After the Last Sky

Palestinian Lives

A searing portrait of Palestinian life and identity that is at once an exploration of Edward Said's unclaimable past and a testimony to the lives of those living in exile. less
Recommended by Raja Shehadeh, and 1 others.

Raja ShehadehIt’s one of my favourite books by the author. I even prefer it to his memoir, Out of Place. While working as a consultant at the U.N. International Conference on the Question of Palestine, Said suggested they hang photographs of Palestinians, taken by the leading Swiss photographer, Jean Mohr, in the entrance hall at the main venue in Geneva. The only text allowed on the captions was place names.... (Source)

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5
Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist’s eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged.

Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Eliot Weinberger has dubbed “perhaps the most accessible and delightful...
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Recommended by Raja Shehadeh, Gideon Lichfield, and 2 others.

Raja ShehadehThis is an amazing biography of the Arab-Israeli poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who was 40 years old when his poetry was first published. (Source)

Gideon LichfieldIt’s a story of the Palestinian people told through a man who actually remained within Israel after the war of independence. (Source)

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